Under the Radar is the Silicon Valley’s most established startup debut platform: a conference series organized by Dealmaker Media, covering business applications, social media, entertainment, mobility..etc.

The 11th Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, CA on April 24, 2009 will focus on Cloud Computing and Business Applications and the organizers have issued a CALL FOR COMPANIES to present.

The general criteria for all UTR events:

Unique value proposition

Ability to monetize product/business

Large market opportunity

Must still be considered "under the radar" – launched in 2008

Company must be an actual startup – not a new product from a large company

Typically 32 finalists are selected, who will present in a rapid-fire format – they are grouped in categories of 4 each, in two parallel tracks and each presenter has about 15 minutes. They get grilled by the judges and audience, and at the end of the conference the winners of each category are announced. Categories for the April event are:

Cloud Infrastructure

Platforms

Virtualization

Saas

Mashups

Collaboration

Communication

Business Apps

Development Tools (Utilities, OS, etc…)

Mobile Office

Semantics

Commerce

Social software/ networks

Sync (online/offline)

If you’re building a startup, meet the criteria above, will have a real product / service out by April, don’t hesitate: APPLY.

See you in April!

(Cross-posted from CloudAve – to stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here)

Now what? Who is right? And the debate does not stop here, it sparked a pretty good discussion in the Enterprise Irregulars group. I think both sides are correct. It’s a Great Time and It’s a Terrible Time… read my take on CloudAve.

Boulder Needs More Kickass Developers

Want a FREE trip to beautiful Boulder, Colorado? The Boulder tech scene is growing like crazy. Twenty of our top tech startups (you can see a few in the sidebar) have banded together to fly in one hundred top software developers, programmers and engineers from across the country, all expenses paid. You can apply to be one of the hundred.

So here we go, getting our dailydose of layoffnews, while Boulder startups are in shortage of talent. Good developers are still worth gold … somewhere. (They mine gold in Colorado)

Developers. Not Management, Marketing, Sales – not the MBA’s. And that’s the clue to understanding a lot of the differences between the startup world we have today and during the late 90’s bubble.

Back then startups got VC-funded and part of the deal was bringing in “pro” management teams: the MBA-types and former corporate Executives who flooded the Valley in the hope of IPO-riches. Founders found themselves in VP / Director positions, or got pushed out, if not, they were left wondering how their little baby got to hundreds of employees so fast and just what all these new managers were doing with their company. Then the bubble burst, and the imported Exec’s rushed back to the safety of the corporate world leaving the wreckage behind.

Today most Web 2.0 startups are run by the original Founder, often a developer him/herself. This is now the age of the technologist, not the business manager. The roles are reversed. These CEO’s, Founders, team members won’t jump ship – the ship is theirs, and there’s nowhere to run back anyway. One more reason to be optimistic about their survival.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of what it’s like to work in Colorado, also home of TechStars and Defrag (use discount code zoli1 to get $300 off @Defrag)

Sure, a lot of startups will fall – and some of them would have done so without a recession anyway. Times are officially tough, but the truly strong businesses will survive, and some of the Web 2.0 whiz-kid baby-CEOs will come out of this as battle-hardened Entrepreneurs.

Talk about Executives… some can wreck the business on their own, they don’t need a crisis: see Entellium wrecked by fraud.

Finally some startups think they can keep on re-architecting forever – see NetBooks, ViewPath (the latter just came out with a new product though.) Good luck to them… wonder if their market runs away…

Fincancial crisis or not, VC investments did not entirely disappear, it’s just getting increasingly difficult to get funded. But VCs are still on the lookout, and as proof I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting this Thursday, October 2nd in San Francisco.

As usual, it’s an informal round-table where up to 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc. This time we’ll welcome Peter Morrissey, Managing Director, Hambrecht Geneva Ventures.

These breakfast meetings are a valuable opportunity for Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:

It’s a pressure-free environment, with no PowerPoint presentations, live demos, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation; but it does not mean you should come unprepared!

Follow a structure, don’t just roam about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.

Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.

It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…

Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 2-3 minutes. You will have about 8-10 minutes, the first half of which is your pitch, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is Q&A with the VC.

Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.

Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up. Arriving an hour late to a one-and-a-half-hour meeting is NOT acceptable, but we’ve had too many such incidents, so here’s a new rule: if you’re late by more than 20 minutes, you will not be allowed to join the session.

After all, those greedy Partners who stole this deal from their Limited Partners made a coupla millions each.

What do you mean they didn’t steal it? Oh, their firm, Insight Venture Partners only does late-stage deals and Photobucket did not qualify? Hm.. small detail, who cares? It’s still guaranteed profit, I want in on such deals.

What? Not guaranteed? Are you crazy? Oh, you mean this is what Venture Capital is all about.. you take a risk and invest in a company that could actually be a dud? Oh, boy, now where do I make my safe millions?

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.

Translation: sorry everyone, we have a popular service and have no clue why it’s constantly crashing. It’s bad. really-really bad. But hey, at least they are honest. And the $15 million they’ve just picked up should be enough to hire someone who actually knows how to get out of this mess. (Update: they just did)

Update: On second thought, I am less optimistic forgiving. Twitter already raised $5M before this round, that should have allowed them to bring in expertise they clearly lack. If only their priorities were on fixing the service instead of chasing more money.

VentureBeat attempts to (well, sort of) explain it with scheduling, but make no mistake, this is a fairly open move against DemoFall, to establish TechCrunch50 as the premier startup launch event. There’s no question that TechCrunch can pull in just about the entire VC community – in fact given the audience pricing, $2000 early bird, and $3000 regular, it’s hard to believe anyone but VCs can afford to attend. Well, VCs and students, as those with a student ID can get in for $149.

The presenting companies will not be charged – that’s a huge differentiate vs. Demo. As I said before, you almost have to be already funded to be able to afford Demo’s fees. I leave it to you to decide which one is more startup-friendly.

Of course they want a real launch show, so the one hard condition is that your product /service will have to be new (unseen) at the Conference. Several commenters are already complaining that they are launching before September, which automatically disqualifies them.

I have a solution for you “early birds”: come join us at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 jointly presented by SVASE and Garage Technology Ventures. Five of last year’s 29 presenters received venture funding, in aggregate of $30M. That’s not $140M, but not too shabby, either.

How to participate? If by June 10th, 2008 (the day of the event) you will have a product or service available, but have not been out in the marketplace for more than a few months, then send an Executive Summary of no more than 2 pages to Launchsv@svase.org. Submission deadline: May 9th, 2008. (Garage Technology offers a useful Writing a Compelling Executive Summary guide.) Last year’s 30 (actually, 29) presenting startups were selected from 170 submissions. For details – and attendee registration – check out http://www.launchsiliconvalley.org/.